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This morning I came across this XKCD strip . (I hope someone actually makes that app... Although with enough parallel ghosts chances are that you will lose more than you win, of course.) Later in the day Flowing Data published this fascinating visualisation of, well, when you might die. (Based on US life tables, mind you...) Each ball is a potential future self. (Like the ghosts in Randal Munroe 's strip.) Travelling along the life table line 'till they... die. Fascinating. And then I wondered what would happen if we somehow mapped causes of death to that? And voila, based on data from CDC , I added this colour coded death causes (along with some other minor changes) to Nathan Yau 's excellent D3.js work: (Click here for a full frame viz.) Scary. What could be next? Bar chart reflects the colour coding of causes? More detailed causes of death could lead to a better... narrative? Life tables and causes of death probabilities from other countries? Maybe ...

A little duo I'm part of these days, 1bisHill (What's with the name you ask? It is a long story...), was asked to play some songs at a gathering at my work the other day. (With a guest star from Brazil.) So, without thinking, I asked my partner in crime, and he said yes, so I said yes. And then I thought about things, and realised that we have lately drifted towards more and more... noise - less, what might be regarded as, ... music ... Perhaps not compatible with playing at people at a party at work. So I got scared. And then I did what I always do when I get scared - tried to find a programmatic solution! This time I created a tiny web service where people could vote for more or less noise. Noisevote, if you want. Pedals with  NSFW names like Big Muff and Swollen Pickle en masse. Basically, server side, it is a really simple Ruby and Sinatra web service with a sqlite database to store votes (running on my Raspberry Pi at home). Client side it is Bootstrap and D3.js w...

Inspired by the discovery of the API for the BoardGameGeek website , I decided to play around with some of its data by some Ruby and JavaScript scripting. One thing I wanted to look at was the interconnectedness of game mechanics, but first I wanted to find alternative ways to look at how to measure ones "use" of ones game collection, and the associated question of "can a board game collection ever be too big?". H-index and play per game For example, the concept of H-index  is being discussed quite a bit on the ’geek. In short this entails sorting your games by number of plays and finding the last entry in the list with a number of plays higher than (or equal to) the position in the list. It’s rank is your H-index. (This does, of course require one to  meticulously  log ones plays, but that is another story… For example my overall BGG H-index for the last 12 months is (or seems to be) a measly 5.) Another concept used is to take the number og games owned an...

One of my most popular posts on this blog is the one about my quick D3 map projections morphing hack . Today I discovered that Mike Bostock , the creator of D3 himself, has made a similar visualization now - only way nicer. Available here:  http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3711652  Enjoy!

Map of Australia mapped on Australia We had a very good geography teacher in high school. He taught us how one should be sceptical and keep an open mind in science (using an anecdote about a scientist proposing an alternative to the theory of tectonic drift). He was also the first person I met that had surfed the Internet - or whatever it was called back in the day. But the thing he showed me the importance of, most relevant to this blog post, is the choice of projections of world maps. You know, the whole 3D globe to 2D piece of paper business. Mapping, qoui. Some are just more equal than others. You see, yesterday evening I decided to finally take a closer look at the D3 visualization library. A couple of the demos on the d3js page , notably the excellent animated  show reel and some of the mapping examples , made me think of discussions I have had with colleagues and friends on map projections. I wondered if animating the transition from one projection to anoth...